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Friday, April 24, 2009

Kew-kew-kew! What's wrong with Mamou?

Would you like to know why, ultimately, it's a good thing we have the American Civil Liberties Union, no matter how much some of its legal advocacy might rile us?

IT'S BECAUSE there's lots of dumbass, thin-skinned, bullying cops in lots of backwater burgs in various undercivilized states who think nothing of using their police powers to torment, for example, terminally ill critics.

The scene: Mamou, La. The crime, according to the Lafayette Daily Advertiser: a letter to the editor of the Ville Platte, La., newspaper.

In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court, Bobby Felix Simmons said he e-mailed the Ville Platte Gazette in May after learning that Mamou Police Chief Greg Dupuis had allegedly received a DWI and abused his authority. The e-mail included those allegations, as well as questions about why the paper had not written a story about the matter.

Later that month, Simmons said he was arrested at his home in Franklin. Officers said he was being arrested for "criminal defamation" and that they were acting on a warrant from the Mamou Police Department. Once in the Franklin jail, Simmons alleges that he was not able to bond out because it was against Dupuis' wishes.

The lawsuit goes on to say that Simmons was later driven to the Mamou jail, where he was allegedly placed in an empty cell and was not offered food, water or medication. About a half-hour later, he was brought to the parish jail in Ville Platte and allowed to bond out.

According to the suit, Simmons has a terminal lung condition and requires breathing treatments every four hours, but authorities in both Franklin and Mamou refused to provide medical treatment.

Named as defendants in the suit are the city of Mamou, Dupuis and Mamou police officers Todd Ortis, Albert Moore, David Charlie and Lucas Lavergne.Following Simmons' arrest, Dupuis was quoted in the Gazette as offering a $500 reward for anyone found to be "spreading rumors" about him, according to the suit.

AND YOU THOUGHT the Dukes of Hazzard was just a TV show. No, as it turns out, the fictional Hazzard County, Ga., was a rather liberal sort of place.

Unlike Mamou. There, it looks like Boss Hogg, Roscoe P. Coltrane and Josef Stalin have been rolled into a single law-enforcement package.

One with a decided mean streak. Which, I suppose, makes me a marked man.

Then again, I suspect Boss Dupuis just might have a leeeeeeetle extradition problem on his hands.